| While biodiversity is a common goal for bioreserve networks, the wide variety of conservation needs and limitations on suitable reserve locations and funds can impose multiple, conflicting demands, forcing decision-makers to make trade-offs. Chapter 1 describes the use of multiobjective programming (MOP), borrowed from the field of operations research, to facilitate the design of bioreserve networks burdened by multiple, conflicting demands. MOP is used to reduce a set of >15,000 potential reserve network designs to a list of 36 candidate networks representing efficient trade-offs among three criteria (connectedness, area, and rare species representation). The simple multiattribute rating technique is then used to rank these 36 efficient alternatives according to the relative value placed on the criteria.; The variety of goals with which animals are faced daily and throughout their lives may also necessitate compromise. In Chapter 2, I use the logic of MOP to predict a pattern of animal behavior that is consistent with efficient compromise. I use this logic to show how animals making patch use choices could address multiple, conflicting demands.; Finally, the potential for animals to compromise could have profound implications for the way in which we manage land as habitat. For example, animals that compromise would most highly value sites offering some balance between conflicting features (e.g., between food and shelter, if there were an inherent trade-off between these features), whereas animals who consider these features one-at-a-time would most highly values sites offering extreme levels of either feature. In Chapter 3, I describe a field experiment in which I determined the features that influenced the habitat selection behavior of white-tailed deer, whether there was evidence that they made efficient compromises between multiple habitat features when selecting habitat, and whether their preference for compromise behavior varied circumstantially. Landscape-level manipulations associated with timber-harvest provided the experimental “treatments” (varying levels of exposure to harvested patches and hunting traffic). Again, the logic of MOP was used to evaluate the behavior of the white-tailed deer for evidence of compromise. In Chapter 4, I present an analogous analysis for moose. |
